Me Too.

Kimberly Speranza writes Sperk*, a fearless examination of life with two adolescent daughters.  She is a stay-at-home mom, divorced, in a relationship, and has a gift for procrastination.  She has been blogging since 2011 and is thrilled to be a BlogHer ’12 Voices of the Year Honoree. Find her on Twitter here,

Kimberly Speranza

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”  ~C.S. Lewis

I have always been afraid to speak.  I’m not sure if the fear manifested from the scary environment I grew up in or if it was because my perpetrator threatened to kill my dog if I told.  I’m just not certain.  Some therapists have surmised that my abuse occurred when I was pre-verbal.  I was silenced even before I had a voice, so maybe a voice seemed like a frivolous afterthought.

I have always kept a journal.  My first was the side of my dresser and my writing utensil was my mother’s lipstick.  But it wasn’t my writing that caught the attention of the grown-ups, it was my dancing.  It brought me love–the love I desperately needed to grow.  So I spent a lot of time being seen and not heard.  Having a voice was not of importance and my feelings found life in my journals.

“Exposure to children is exposure to one’s own unresolved past.”   ~Michael Thompson

I am a mom.  When my daughters were little, we spent a lot of time dancing in the living room just for fun.   I also spent a lot of time helping them choose words to describe how they felt, what they saw, or what they needed.  And we wrote.  My girls have always had journals, even before they wrote words.  They filled pages with pictures and scribbles that mimicked my handwriting.

My girls are 12 and 14 years old now.  They know me as a talker, a writer, and a former dancer.  I am still sometimes afraid to speak.  But I am never afraid to write.

Sharing my writing is the scary part.  It opens up the door to vulnerability and I don’t enjoy that feeling.  But after exactly one year of writing at my blog, Sperk*, I know that sharing my story is too important to allow myself to succumb to fear.  Yes, it’s important to my healing, but more so, it’s vital to healing the world of the pandemic of child sexual abuse.

I write for every single “me too!” that ends up in the comments on my blog.

Whether I write about my journey of healing, parenting, depression, what I had for dinner, or what the dog did after dinner, I write for the “me too!”

I know that once the words take up residence online they are no longer mine.  They belong to you.  They adjust and transform, becoming meaningful in a different way than I intended.  And that’s OK.  Do you think we all hear music in the same way?  But sometimes we enjoy the same song.

Let’s keep singing, “me too, me too!”